9/13/2008

U.S. government scientists are bombarding the skies with the acid-rain causing pollutant sulphur dioxide in an attempt to fight global warming by “geo-engineering” the planet, despite the fact that injecting aerosols into the upper atmosphere carries with it a host of both known and unknown dangers.

The proposal to disperse sulphur dioxide in an attempt to reflect sunlight was again raised in a London Guardian article this week entitled, Geoengineering: The radical ideas to combat global warming, in which Ken Caldeira, a leading climate scientist based at the Carnegie Institution in Stanford, California, promotes the idea of injecting the atmosphere with aerosols.

“One approach is to insert “scatterers” into the stratosphere,” states the article. “Caldeira cites an idea to deploy jumbo jets into the upper atmosphere and deposit clouds of tiny particles there, such as sulphur dioxide. Dispersing around 1m tonnes of sulphur dioxide per year across 10m square kilometres of the atmosphere would be enough to reflect away sufficient amounts of sunlight.